Bound in Venice by Alessandro Marzo Magno

Author:Alessandro Marzo Magno
Language: ita
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2013-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

6.

The Wind from the East

The Balkans begin at the Rennweg,” Prince Metternich, the Prime Minister of Austria was fond of saying. Rennweg was the name of the street he lived on in Vienna. Long before Metternich, Venetians knew that elsewhere was right outside the door. Venice is Europe’s port to the East, and you don’t even have to leave the Venetian state to find yourself in the East: among its subjects living in the Balkans the Serene Republic counts numerous communities—Catholics in Dalmatia, Orthodox in the Bay of Kotor, and Venetian Albania—who speak Slavic languages. These communities that need liturgical books and their capital city is obviously ready to supply them: the communities are part of the domestic market, so there are no cost-inflating customs duties to pay. And then there’s the export market: in its role as the giant multinational of publishing, Venice is willing to work for anyone who shows up with a text to be composed in one hand and some cash in the other. So, although the first two Czech editions of the Bible are printed in Bohemia, the third is printed in Venice in 1506, on the presses of Peter Lichtenstein. It is an Utraquist Bible, written for use by the moderate wing of the Hussite movement, members of which are nevertheless dangerous miscreants in the eyes of the Church of Rome. The Hus­sites, who take their name from Jan Hus, burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415, had been defeated in Bohemia, after twenty years of war, by the Catholic Church and the high feudal nobility. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, the moderate wing of the movement, made up of the lesser nobility and the bourgeoisie, adheres to the Protestant Reformation, while the radical wing, the Taborites, made up primarily of peasants, had been crushed earlier.

Again, in this case it is easy to hypothesize that the freedom enjoyed by the Republic in the early sixteenth century played a fundamental role and that the Bohemian Protestants therefore considered it less risky to print their reform Bible in the shadows of Saint Mark’s than that of Saint Wenceslaus. Obviously, the book was intended for export and indeed there is only one surviving copy of the Utraquist Bible in Italy today, conserved in Venice at the Cini Foundation.

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